How we know what we know
Nearly every source on the internet that claims to know what a private club costs has invented the number. We only publish figures we can point at a document for, and we show you which document.
The financial spine: IRS Form 990
Most private clubs are 501(c)(7) tax-exempt social clubs, which means they file an annual Form 990 that anyone can read. Those returns report total revenue, expenses, assets, net assets, and — critically — initiation-fee revenue as its own line. We have parsed those filings for every club in the directory that files one. Clubs organised as taxable corporations file nothing, and simply have less data here.
Why initiation-fee revenue matters
A club's initiation-fee revenue is the total it collected from new members that year. A sharp year-over-year rise means it admitted materially more people than the year before. That is the closest public proxy that exists for whether a club is open, and no consumer source publishes it. Read it as a signal, not a certainty: a rise can also mean a club raised its fee rather than admitted more people.
Where the fees come from
Some clubs publish a rate card. Far more often, the numbers surface in executive search profiles — when a club hires a general manager or a chef, it hands the recruiter a table of initiation fees, dues, member counts and revenue, and those documents sit on public web servers. We also use local journalism, planning and zoning filings, and, clearly labelled as such, accounts from members on public forums.
What the confidence ratings mean
Well sourced means the figure comes from the club's own published document, or from a dated document the club supplied to a recruiter. Reported means named journalism or an undated club-supplied figure. Unverified means a forum post, a blog comment, or a figure old enough that we would not rely on it. Every number on the site carries its rating and its source, and where a source gave a range rather than a number we show the range.
How the category scores work
The scores out of ten on each club page — golf, tennis, paddle, dining, family, difficulty of entry, breadth — are computed from documented facts, not from anybody's opinion. Golf is scored from position on national and state ranking lists, championships hosted, the architect of record and the size of the property. Tennis and paddle are scored from court count, surface and indoor capacity. Family is scored from junior programming, whether there is a pool, and whether the club runs family or junior categories. Difficulty of entry is scored from sponsors and letters required, the initiation fee, and whether the list is currently closed. The full weighting for each is printed at the bottom of its ranking page.
Why a category is sometimes blank
Because we have not documented it. A club with no court count on file gets no tennis score rather than a guessed one, and it is left off the tennis ranking entirely rather than placed at the bottom. This means the boards get better as the data fills in, and that absence from a board is never evidence of anything about the club.
What we will not publish
Member names or directories, under any circumstances. We also do not republish the confident-looking initiation fees that circulate on aggregator sites; we could find no sourcing behind any of them, and several are demonstrably wrong.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say so. Clubs are welcome to submit their own numbers, which we will mark as club-supplied and date.